When to Stay, When to Go

If you’re reading this because you’re considering a move abroad, or because you already have and are still processing that decision, I understand why history might become part of the question. It certainly became part of mine. I spent a long time in the historical record before I felt clear about my own decision, looking at what people had done when governments became unstable, institutions weakened, or the political future of a country became frighteningly uncertain. What I found did not give me a formula. History cannot tell you whether your own circumstances have crossed some invisible threshold at which leaving becomes the correct decision, and it certainly cannot predict what will happen next. What it can do is challenge some of the moral assumptions we carry into the question, especially the familiar idea that brave people stay and fight while frightened or selfish people leave.

The historical record is far messier than that. People have resisted from inside authoritarian states, escaped them, organized from exile, protected their families, documented crimes, preserved threatened cultures, returned after decades away, and sometimes never returned at all. Some who stayed accomplished extraordinary things. Some were imprisoned or killed before their work could bear fruit. Some who left became indispensable witnesses, organizers, scholars, journalists, and keepers of cultural memory. Others did nothing grand at all; they survived, raised children, made ordinary lives somewhere safer, and refused to let the state that drove them out determine the rest of their existence. History gives us no clean hierarchy among these choices, which is precisely why I think it is such a useful corrective to the moral pressure people can feel when deciding whether to stay or go.

When Institutions Still Matter

Civic resistance can matter enormously while meaningful political space remains. Courts can restrain governments, journalists can expose abuses, elections can remove leaders, and civil society can organize people who would otherwise believe themselves isolated. Teachers, lawyers, clergy, artists, activists, bureaucrats, opposition politicians, and ordinary citizens can all create friction against the concentration of power. At this stage, resistance is not symbolic. It can preserve norms, slow abuses, force public scrutiny, protect vulnerable people, and sometimes change the political direction of a country altogether.

The danger is assuming that institutions remain healthy simply because they still exist. The collapse of the Weimar Republic is instructive precisely because Germany did not move from functioning democracy to completed dictatorship in a single dramatic moment. Hitler was appointed chancellor in January 1933 through the constitutional political process after conservative elites convinced themselves that they could use his popularity while containing him within a government they expected to control. They were catastrophically wrong. Emergency powers suspended civil liberties, political opponents were arrested and assaulted, and the Nazis used legislation alongside intimidation and violence to bring institutions into alignment with the regime. Parliament continued to exist, but eventually as little more than an instrument of a government that had destroyed meaningful parliamentary opposition.

That history does not prove that institutions are useless, nor does it suggest that people should abandon them at the first sign of strain. It shows instead why their actual condition matters more than their continued appearance. A court that still issues independent judgments is different from one whose decisions are predetermined. An election capable of removing those in power is different from one maintained primarily to legitimize them. A newspaper that faces political pressure but can still investigate and publish is different from a press that has become an arm of the state. Democratic forms can survive after democratic functions have begun to erode, and one of the hardest tasks for people living through political instability is determining whether the mechanisms they are relying on still possess the power they appear to have.

Resistance Changes as Power Changes

The possibilities available to people also change as governments become more repressive. Opposition under an imperfect democracy is not the same activity as opposition under a police state, because the risks, audiences, methods, and realistic objectives change. At one point, resistance may mean campaigning, organizing, litigating, reporting, voting, or demonstrating. Under more extreme repression, those same acts may become impossible, and the work may shift toward hiding people, preserving records, circulating forbidden information, maintaining an underground institution, or simply refusing to participate in an official lie.

The White Rose students illustrate this painfully. Hans and Sophie Scholl and their companions distributed anti-Nazi leaflets in 1942 and 1943, openly condemning the regime and urging Germans to resist it. Several members were arrested and executed, including Hans and Sophie only days after their arrest. Their leaflets did not bring down Hitler, and the students themselves understood that Nazi domination would ultimately have to be defeated by military force. Yet describing their resistance only by whether it changed government policy would miss what they were trying to preserve. Their work testified that not everyone had consented, that moral judgment had not disappeared completely, and that truth still existed even when the state controlled nearly every public institution through which truth might otherwise have been spoken.

That distinction matters because resistance has more than one possible purpose. Sometimes it is intended to change an immediate political outcome. Sometimes it protects vulnerable people or preserves evidence for a future reckoning. Sometimes it maintains a moral, intellectual, or religious tradition that the state is trying to destroy. Under extreme repression, even refusing to cooperate can become meaningful, although the person making that refusal may pay an enormous price for an act that does little to weaken the state itself. Admiring that courage does not mean everyone living under similar conditions had an obligation to make the same choice. The courage of the White Rose does not become greater if we decide that every German who fled Nazi rule should instead have remained and risked execution. Those were different choices made by people with different vulnerabilities, responsibilities, opportunities, and capacities.

This is where romanticizing resistance becomes dangerous. We remember the people whose courage became legible after the fact, but history is full of others whose sacrifices changed little, whose names disappeared, or whose families paid a price no later memorial could repair. That does not make their choices meaningless. It does mean that sacrifice itself should not become the measure by which we judge everyone else’s morality. The fact that one person chose to endure extraordinary danger cannot create an obligation for another person to do the same.

Leaving Has Its Own History

Exile is often narrated as an ending, but historically it has frequently become another political and cultural space. People who escape repression can say things that people inside cannot, preserve documents governments want destroyed, support relatives and organizations financially, publish banned writing, lobby foreign governments, maintain intellectual traditions, and create records for a future that may not yet be visible. Physical distance can remove someone from direct political action inside a country while making other kinds of work possible for the first time.

The history of the twentieth century is full of communities that functioned this way. Refugees from Nazi Germany carried scholarship, art, political thought, testimony, and cultural memory into other countries. Spanish Republicans rebuilt political, intellectual, and cultural organizations in exile after Franco’s victory, even though the dictatorship lasted far longer than many initially imagined. Chileans forced abroad after the 1973 coup established communities across Europe and the Americas that remained connected to human-rights advocacy and opposition to the dictatorship. Exile did not preserve every movement, nor did diaspora politics always produce unity or influence, but it repeatedly created spaces in which ideas, testimony, and institutions could survive beyond the reach of the governments trying to suppress them.

Not everyone who left became an activist, and I think that matters just as much. People are allowed to save their children, protect their health, seek economic stability, or simply want a life in which politics does not consume everything. Survival does not need to be transformed into resistance before it becomes legitimate. A person should not have to prove that leaving served some larger historical mission before they are allowed to regard the decision as morally defensible.

At the same time, leaving does not necessarily end a person’s relationship with the place left behind. Exiles have written, testified, sent money home, supported dissidents, preserved language and culture, built institutions abroad, and sometimes returned when political circumstances changed. Others have discovered that exile became permanent and built identities that belonged partly to two places and fully to neither. History contains all of these outcomes, which is precisely why it offers so little support for the simple accusation that departure equals abandonment. Leaving changes the terms of a person’s relationship to a country, but it does not automatically erase that relationship.

History Cannot Tell You When to Leave

This is where historical analogy becomes both useful and dangerous. We know how Weimar Germany ended. We know what Franco’s dictatorship became and how long it lasted. We know which dissidents were arrested, which refugees escaped in time, which institutions collapsed, and which eventually recovered. The people living through those moments did not have access to the completed story. They made decisions while surrounded by rumor, denial, false reassurance, panic, incomplete information, financial constraints, family obligations, and the very human tendency to believe that tomorrow will resemble yesterday more than it actually might.

Neither do we have access to the completed story of our own time. That makes questions like “What stage are we in?” useful only up to a point. Political scientists and historians can identify warning signs associated with democratic erosion and authoritarian consolidation, but history does not provide a meter that moves cleanly from democracy to danger to “time to leave.” Countries diverge. Institutions recover. Governments lose elections. Opposition movements succeed or fail for reasons that were not obvious beforehand. Events that later appear inevitable rarely felt inevitable to the people living through them, and hindsight can make uncertainty look like blindness when it was often simply uncertainty.

A better framework is therefore not to ask history to make the decision for us, but to let it broaden the questions we ask. Which institutions still constrain power in meaningful ways? What would you actually be able to accomplish by staying? What responsibilities do you have to children, partners, parents, employees, or others who depend on you? What would leaving preserve that staying might put at risk, and what would leaving cost? What forms of participation would remain available to you from elsewhere? How much of your decision is based on conditions you can actually observe, and how much is being shaped by either reassurance or catastrophe imagined in advance? These questions will not produce the same answer for everyone, nor should they. Circumstances differ too much for courage to have one geographic expression.

What I Took From the Historical Record

I read a great deal before I felt settled in my own thinking because I wanted something more substantial than the loud cultural messages surrounding the question. I did not find historical permission to leave, because history is not an authority capable of granting it. What I found instead was freedom from a false binary. The people we now remember as witnesses, resisters, survivors, refugees, exiles, dissidents, and rebuilders made radically different choices under conditions they could only partially understand, and history has room for all of them.

Some stayed because there was work they believed they could still do. Some stayed because they could not leave. Some escaped at the first opportunity. Some waited and later wished they had gone sooner. Others left expecting a temporary absence and spent the rest of their lives abroad. Some returned when circumstances changed; others discovered that the life they had built elsewhere had become home. We know some of their stories because they survived long enough to tell them, while countless others remain almost invisible in the historical record. That alone should make us wary of turning any one path into a universal moral standard.

The record makes me skeptical whenever courage is defined primarily by geography. Staying can be courageous, but so can leaving. Either can also be imprudent, necessary, impossible, selfish, generous, strategic, accidental, or simply the best choice a person could make with incomplete information. What matters is not whether the decision resembles the kind of story a culture likes to celebrate afterward, but whether it responds honestly to the realities a person can actually see and to the responsibilities they carry.

History does not tell us that good people stay. It tells us that people facing frightening political change have always had to make decisions without knowing the ending, and that the choices later simplified into heroic narratives were usually made amid confusion, uncertainty, compromise, and fear. The most useful thing the past can offer us is not a verdict about which decision proves our courage, but a wider understanding of what human beings have done with the choices available to them.

That is a less satisfying answer than a rule, but I think it is a more honest one. When the future feels unstable, the task is not to perform courage according to somebody else’s script. It is to think as clearly as possible about what you can protect, what you can influence, what you are responsible for, and where your life can still be lived with integrity.

Sources and Further Reading

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951.

Beevor, Antony. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936–1939. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018.

Paxton, Robert O. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

Stern, Steve J. Remembering Pinochet’s Chile: On the Eve of London 1998. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Nazi Rise to Power.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Accessed 2026.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The White Rose.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Accessed 2026.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “The Weimar Republic.” Holocaust Encyclopedia. Accessed 2026.